City watch.

An R.i.p. For A Chicago Original

Pals Unite To Get Artist A Tombstone

Eddie Balchowsky's pals figured it would cost about $5,000 to get him a proper burial place and a proper tombstone. Hence the recent "Ed Balchowsky Gravestone Kick-Off Event."

Eddie Balchowsky lost an arm fighting for the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, then spent the rest of his life becoming a Chicago legend.

An Old Town painter, a piano player who could do the "Moonlight" Sonata with one hand, a raconteur, he ate a bowl of oatmeal every morning at 7 at the old Busy Bee in Wicker Park.

"He was Chicago's Huck Finn," moaned Studs Terkel a dozen years ago when Balchowsky suffered a Chicago-style demise: run over by an "L" train.

They talked about that--and Eddie--when they gathered Sunday at the Flamenco Arts Club, a storefront at 3755 N. Western Ave. with lots of mirrors on the walls.

Utah Phillips, a folk singer, a storyteller and a longtime friend of Balchowsky's, set the tone. He started off the afternoon with almost an hour of songs and stories about Balchowsky, the Spanish Civil War and the struggle by ordinary people from around the world to turn back the tide of fascism when Western democracies stood still.

"I remember walking into the old Quiet Knight one afternoon and hearing someone playing `Moonlight' Sonata on a piano in the gloom," he remembered. "It was only when I got real close that I saw he only had one hand. But it was the most beautiful [music] I'd ever heard. Later, I found out he was the caretaker of the place."

"This was a man who was our Falstaff and our Hamlet," added Stu McCarrell, one of the half-dozen veterans of the Lincoln Brigade still alive in the Chicago area and a regular organizer of reunions.

Some told of buying paintings and other works of art from Balchowsky who, when he was hard up for funds, would make his way from tavern to tavern, selling his works in what are now more fashionable areas of the North Side.

For years, others noted, he showed up at the Busy Bee Restaurant, a now-shuttered eatery near Wicker Park, early every morning for a bowl of oatmeal. It was there that friends gathered in 1989 for a memorial service after the sad news spread through the community. Just when his fortunes seemed on the rise--his art works were selling well and some of his art had been chosen to decorate Oprah Winfrey's restaurant, Eccentric--he died, at 73.

It was not, Phillips recalled Sunday, the first report of Balchowsky's death.

"Sometime in the fall of 1989, I got a call that Eddie had died," Phillips told the crowd. "It really hit me hard. "I sat down and wrote a song about Eddie, about what his life had meant. A week later, I got a call--from Eddie.

"I was quite surprised and I said, `Where you callin' from?'"

Several months after that, the news was, well, more final.

On a cold December morning, Balchowsky's body was found on the subway tracks. He had been hit by a CTA train at North and Clybourn Avenues. What happened was unclear. Some thought he might have stumbled off the platform. Others suggested he had been pushed. Still others blamed it on Balchowsky's years of drug addiction, brought on by an unthinking doctor who had put him on high doses of morphine to counter the pain of his war injury.

He was buried without a headstone in Waldheim Cemetery, now Forest Home Cemetery, in Forest Park. But for the friends who gathered Sunday, the message of Eddie's life rose beyond details of his death.

"This is a man who risked his life and lost his right arm in the noble fight against fascism, the Civil War in Spain," noted McCarrell, recalling the night-shrouded Spanish hillside where Balchowsky's dream of becoming a concert pianist was shattered by an enemy machine gun. A burst of bullets had caught him when his commander, not knowing that his unit had been surrounded in the dark, ordered Balchowsky to walk back to the base camp for food rations.

It was not the first time Balchowsky had been in a battle, his friends recalled.

An ebullient man, Balchowsky often reminisced about growing up in the only Jewish family in south suburban Frankfort, a largely German community. His grandfather, from Poland, settled there at the invitation of the town fathers who needed a grocer. But World War I ended the good terms between the town and its Jewish merchant.

Balchowsky`s family insisted on flying an American flag, which offended customers whose German relatives were ducking American bullets and shells. Balchowsky was a teenager. The epithets hit him on his way to school.

"His mother insisted Ed turn the other cheek when boys picked on him. He used to say: `In Spain, I finally found a way to fight back,'" one friend noted. "I wasn't that much into politics," Balchowsky himself once noted. What had fired him up, he explained, were the anti-Semitic rantings of many of Franco's generals.

"If the Western democracies had had the courage of Eddie in facing up to fascism, we might have avoided World War II," Phillips told the crowd. "That's his message--and we should remember it."

"Please stay around and share your stories of Eddie," added organizer Jeff Balch, announcing that the Chicago Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade stand ready to take pledges for his gravestone fund at 847-864-9468.